ABSTRACT
Film scholarship has placed its emphasis on star studies rather than on the examination of film acting. As a result, the acting techniques of Hollywood stars have received far too little scholarly attention. Within the field of star studies, the focus has fallen overwhelmingly on ideological criticism of star images and the historical examination of the star system. The study of stars as actors, which is, after all, the major reason for their stardom, has been pushed to the side. Also, the common conception that stars actually cannot act but just play themselves on screen has interfered with the examination of their acting methods. This idea stems from the common association of star acting with personification, the mode of acting in which actors are seen as playing themselves in their various roles. The theory of personification insists that the “star is always himself or herself, only thinly disguised as a character.” Actors are seen as not really acting, but just “being” on the screen, and their characters are considered merely “fictional extension[s] of the actors’ true personalities” (Maltby 2003: 384). Barry King has called this type of acting “concerted cynosure,” which involves the fusion of the roles actors play with their own personalities (2003: 46).
